The Hypertext Novel and Whatever Became Of

Prepress version of Chapter 1 of Interactive Digital Narrative: History, Theory and Practice. Hartmut Koenitz, Gabriele Ferri, Mads Haar, Digdem Sezen and Tonguc Ibrihim Sezen, eds. Routledge, 2015. ISBN: 978-1-13-878239-6. If citing this article, please reference published version The American Hypertext Novel, and Whatever Became of It? Scott Rettberg The 1990 Eastgate publication of Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, A Story earned hypertext fiction a place within institutionalised literary culture. Robert Coover’s 1992 essay ‘The End of Books’ announced hypertext fiction as a challenge to traditional conceptions such as narrative linearity, the sense of closure, and the “desire for coherence.” While some theorists, such as George Landow, praised hypertext for instantiating poststructuralist theory, others such as Sven Birkerts, in The Gutenberg Elegies, regarded it with strong concern. The publication of more hypertext fictions such as Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden (1991) and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) resulted in a small, dedicated interest community. However, no paradigm-shifting rise in interest took place. The independent publication of hypertext novels on the World Wide Web such as Robert Arellano’s Sunshine 69 (1996), Mark Amerika’s Grammatron (1997), and William Gillespie, Frank Marquardt, Scott Rettberg, and Dirk Stratton’s The Unknown (1998) briefly revitalised the networked fictional form before it was eclipsed in the first decade of the 21st century by a range of other digital narrative forms. 1. Hypertext Fiction Before the Web During the 1990s, as the personal computer became a fixture of everyday life in offices and homes, writers and academics became interested in exploring the potential of hypertext as a genre for narrative fiction. During the early 1990s in particular, the form seemed to offer great promise as a logical literary follow-on both to late 20th century post-structuralist theory and to general shifts in late 20th century fiction writing, especially in the United States, towards postmodern narrative structures that contested prior conventions of linearity, closure and immersive reading. For what was in retrospect a quite brief period during the late 1980s and early 1990s, what Robert Coover (1999) referred to as the ‘Golden Age’ of literary hypertext, writers working in dedicated hypertext systems such as Hypercard, the Intermedia system at Brown University and, most importantly, Storyspace, explored the potential of hypertext for narrative fiction. Enough writers were working in the form during this period, and their works garnered enough critical attention, that we can speak of these hypertext fictions as a group—what some of have called ‘The Eastgate School’—named after the publisher responsible for publishing and distributing most of the early works of hypertext fiction. Hypertext was first conceptualised by Theodore Holm Nelson (1965) in his paper ‘A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate’ when he introduced the term “to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.” In his ‘No More Teachers’ Dirty Looks’ (1970), Nelson followed up with a more expansive definition of “hyper-media” as “branching or performing presentations which respond to user actions, systems of prearranged words and pictures (for example) which may be explored freely or queried in stylized ways.” Among the types of hypertexts he discusses in that essay, which focused on the potential uses of hypermedia in new systems that could potentially revolutionise education are “discrete hypertexts” which “consist of separate pieces of text connected by links.” The majority of hypertext fictions published during the 1980s and 1990s would fit within this rubric though, as Noah Wardrip-Fruin (2004) argued, this conception of hypertext as “chunk-style” linked nodes is somewhat narrower than hypermedia as Nelson originally envisioned it. The post-millennial turn in electronic literature towards a broader use of media-rich texts, more complex uses of generativity and other computational processes, and deeper engagement with network-specific communication technologies and styles of writing better represents the broader range of hypertext and hypermedia as conceptualised by Nelson than either the first-generation hypertext fictions published by Eastgate or the second-generation works published on the Web. During the 1980s, digital writing experiments, including long-form hypertext fictions such as Judy Malloy’s pioneering “hyperfictional narrative database” Uncle Roger (1986),1 were distributed on bulletin boards such as the WELL.2 Interactive fiction developed separately from hypertext fiction, emerging from a different cultural context. The text-parser-based form of interactive digital writing that began with Colossal Cave Adventure by Will Crowther and Don Woods (1976) saw commercial success during the 1980s with Infocom titles such as the Zork series before graphic computer games swallowed the market in the late 1980s. As Nick Montfort documents in his Twisty Little Passages (2003), an amateur community developed around the 1 Uncle Roger was first published in serial form on Art Com Electronic Network and then programmed in BASIC and distributed on the ACEN Datanet. She then published a web version of the work in 1995. 2 Jill Walker Rettberg’s Electronic Literature Seen from a Distance: The Beginnings of a Field provides an excellent introduction both to the scene from which the Eastgate writers emerged and other less-chronicled early electronic literature communities, such as the one that formed on the WELL. form shortly thereafter, enabled by group effort and the release of free programming languages, authoring and reading environments such as TADS (in 1987) and Inform (in 1993). Though there were substantial literary and aesthetic achievements in interactive fiction, outside of a few outliers,3 it was not until the publisher and software developer Eastgate Systems began publishing hypertext fiction in 1987 that literary critics began to significantly engage with electronic literature. The novelist Robert Coover played an important role in bringing these experimental fictions to the notice of a broader public, most notably in his 1992 New York Times Book Review essay ‘The End of Books,’ which introduced hypertext fiction to a broader literary audience. The essay describes the ways that the hypertext form poses challenges for writers, and readers accustomed to conventional narrative forms, including assumptions about linearity, closure and the division of agency between the writer and reader. Coover focused on the disruptions that hypertext caused to narrative linearity, its interruption of “the tyranny of the line” (Coover, 1992). Coover noted that in hypertext, the narrative structures of fictions are foregrounded and become a predominant concern: “The most radical new element that comes to the fore in hypertext is the system of multidirectional and often labyrinthine linkages we are invited or obliged to create.” Coover identified a core tension for fiction writers working in hypertextual forms in the “conflict between the reader’s desire for coherence and closure and the text’s desire for continuance, its fear of death.” Coover asked: “If the author is free to take a story anywhere at any time and in as many directions as she or he wishes, does that not become the obligation to do so?” Coover’s essay on hypertext remains a key summation of the affordances and opportunity costs of 3 Mary Ann Buckles 1987 UC San Diego Ph.D. dissertation Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame ‘Adventure’ was the first book-length academic work on the form. hypertext for fiction writers. Forms such as the short story and particularly the novel have a deep, if not intrinsic, relationship to the limits and constraints of print. Whatever belief one has of the function of fiction, most stories or novels strive to reduce, distil and make comprehensible an experience or perception of the world. The role of the fiction writer is both to provide a particular perspective on human experience and to select and enliven some narrative possibilities while eliminating others. The form of the book—such that each page requires more paper and each word more ink—pulls the writer towards economy, restraint, and limitation while the form of hypertext, offering multiple pathways, limitless text and multiple medial modalities, pulls authors towards exploration and expansiveness. The potential uses of hypertext links in a narrative fiction are multifarious, ranging from offering the reader conscious plot choices in a choose-your-own-adventure style, to establishing multiple narrative lines of narrative or multiple character perspectives on the same set of events, to serving as any kind of footnote-style reference, to poetic or linguistic play between words or scenes in a narrative. In Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, A Story (1989) we saw the hypertext link used in all of these various ways in the story of a man in a state of breakdown after a car accident in which his son may or may not have been killed. The fragmented and disrupted nature of the narrator’s psychological and emotional state finds an objective correlative in the hypertextual form of the narrative. The narrative of Afternoon centres on the various overlapping relations and conflicts between the main narrator Peter, his ex-wife Lisa, her lover Wert (Werther), Lolly and Nausicaa. There is no need to provide a close reading of Afternoon here—as it is the most cited work of electronic literature,4 and ample discussions of the work are available elsewhere. However, we can highlight a few formal aspects of the work. The first is that the work is playing a great deal with indeterminacy and a sense of loss and confusion. The reader can follow a default path, but there are also typically several links on a given node of the story. Joyce, however, chose not to make those links visible to the reader. Instead, he encouraged readers to seek out “words that yield”—that is, to click on given words that seem to be particularly evocative, and to see if the system will respond.

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